Cassandra, the NoSQL database from Apache that was originally developed by Facebook, is now available in version 1.0.

This illustrious start may be one reason why it’s already in use by companies including Twitter and Google, with at least one production cluster that’s larger than 300 terabytes.

The new release promises better performance and management of disk space, though for some developers the fact it can now be used as a Windows service will be the most useful improvement.

Another improvement to the disk space management is the ability to compress data by ColumnFamily. You can set up ColumnFamilies where you have data with many rows, each having the same columns in common. For example, you might set up a ColumnFamily containing user data such as forename, surname, email, username. The more similar the data across rows, the greater the compression ratio will be, and the larger the gain in read performance.